A UK SEO

It’s been a while since I’ve reviewed my Blog Roll list so I’ve made a few additions tonight.

http://blog.arhg.net/ – Andrew Girdword of BigMouthMedia
http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk – Dave Naylor of Bronco
http://www.searchcowboys.com/ – Search Cowboys
http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/ – Blog Storm
http://www.seomad.com/ – Neil Walker of Just Search

If you have a great blog let me know in the comments, if you keep me entertained for a few months I’ll add your blog to the others.

Google recently have been working hard on developing tools and new methods to combat duplicate content. 301’s remain the best fix and prevention is best done with robots.txt blocks and nofollow, but the new tools are great if you can’t get access to redirect or block.

Duplicate content causes a split of page rank, can cause some pages to be filtered from rankings but big websites seem to not care about the issue. If the big site’s don’t care about it, why should a site for a small business concentrate on often making lengthy changes or spend time on re-directs that some sites don’t even bat an eyelid at the issue?

Let’s have a look at some examples.

BBC

On the whole the SEO on the BBC is good but they do have a duplicate content issue on the site. I first pointed this out in a post back in February. The problem seen was two URL’s for each page.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/teams/a/arsenal/7831046.stm

You also have a second URL, the difference it’s in the folder sport2 and not sport1

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/teams/a/arsenal/7831046.stm

On top of that there is also the low graphic version of the page.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/low/football/teams/b/blackpool/7831046.stm

And under the sport2 folder

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/low/football/teams/b/blackpool/7831046.stm

Facebook

Another post I did a while ago where your profile can be loaded up on two URL’s

http://www.facebook.com/johnpcampbell

and

http://en-gb.facebook.com/johnpcampbell

Also some profiles now appearing with ?_fb_noscript=1 after the URL’s. That example above isn’t indexed but these two are http://www.facebook.com/wgardner69 and http://en-gb.facebook.com/wgardner69?_fb_noscript=1 some random person!

LinkedIn

Spotted by a work colleague of mine Neil Walker (follow him on twitter @theukseo) he noticed LinkedIn had a duplication problem with two URL’s for his profile.

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/neil-walker/4/41a/793

http://www.linkedin.com/in/internetmarketingoptimisation

Travel Supermarket & Virgin Media

Another spot form Neil was a very strange duplication on Travel Supermarket & Virgin Media. This time it looked like they have duplicated content on a sub domain rather than having two URL’s for one page of content.

Twitter

Can’t remember who spotted this (please comment and I’ll link) but twitter has a https duplication problem and a mobile sub domain duplicating.

m.twitter.com/johnpcampbell

https://twitter.com/johnpcampbell

Looking today there is also explore.twitter.com/johnpcampbell indexed but they have a fix in place in the form of a 301 re-direct to twitter.com/johnpcampbell

Should you still care about duplicate content?

In all these example due to the size and the power of the sites it’s not really having an adverse effect on their overall performance (like throwing a dart at godzilla! he’s not going to feel a thing). Google seems to be able to work out which is the correct URL to display. It would be nice to know the effects of correcting this as these sites have so many pages.

Just a little fix to stop duplicate content on twitter would cut the crawling time of Google allowing the search engine to spider more pages. Unfortunately we’ll never know but I’ll keep on fixing site-wide duplicate content issues.

Do you thing big companies need to sort out duplicate content issues? Add a comment

A huge part of being a good SEO is digesting news, blogs, views, reports, whitepapers and filtering out the crap. He’s a list of 25 companies in the UK offering SEO services who are publishing some content that isn’t crap. They range from the small to the large but all tend to push out good content on RSS.

Links to Site in alphabetical order

Amaze
Base One
Big Mouth Media
Branded3
Bronco
Data Dial
Distilled
Fresh Egg
Further
Green Light
I Crossing
Just Search Ltd
Lake Star Media
Latitude
NorthSouthMedia
Push On
Receptional
redsauce
SEO Consult
SEO Optimise
Site Visibility
Stuck On
The SEO Company
Verve Search

RSS Feeds in alphabetical order

Amaze
Base One
Big Mouth Media
Branded3
Bronco
Data Dial
Distilled
Fresh Egg
Further
Green Light
I Crossing
Just Search Ltd
Lake Star Media
Latitude
NorthSouthMedia
Push On
Receptional
redsauce
SEO Consult
SEO Optimise
Site Visibility
Stuck On
The SEO Company
Verve Search

Download as an OPML file to upload into Google Reader (26th bonus RSS is this blog)

Twitter Accounts – 18 account 6 missing (Branded3, Data Dial, Further, Push On, redsauce, The SEO Company)

amazeplc
baseonegroup
bigmouthmedia
bronco
distilled
freshegg
Warren_Cowan
icrossing_uk
justsearching
lakestarmedia
Latitude_Group
northsouthmedia
Receptional
seoconsult
seoptimise
SiteVisibility
StuckonSEO
LisaDMyers

Follow all in one click with http://tweepml.org/25-UK-SEO-Companies/

Missed any off ? Then please add to the comments and I’ll add them on the post if they are any good!

EDIT A few to add from comments from people

Verticle Leap – RSS @verticleleap

MediaEdge – No RSS – @MECmanchester

MediaVest – No RSS – @mediavest_leeds

Ayima – No RSS – No Twitter

Yes, yes we know that Google doesn’t use the meta keyword tag. It was mentioned in a post back in December 2007 they ignore it. Today’s video and blog post just to any that missed it.

Yoast had a great idea to get the new post ranking for meta keywords so SEO’s don’t need to answer the question from clients. We can just say “Google Meta Keyword” for an explanation.

So if you have a blog link to the post using the anchor text meta keywords. It’s at 27 in the UK rankings at the moment being out ranked by a few blogs published today mashable, searchenginejournal and malcolmcoles. So if we all link together…

The site is 1 year old today. Over the past 12 months there has been 105 posts which is one every 3.4761904761904761904761904761905 days which isn’t too shabby.

Maybe I can aim for one every other day?

The most popular question from clients to SEO’s is How Many Links Do I Have? My answer, it depends.

There’s a little more explanation to it. What seems to work well for me is to show the difference in the number of links different tools report for my Blackpool FC Blog.

There are multiple websites that you can use to get a total on the number of links your website has, I can think of six in total

Google Link Command – 6
Yahoo Site Explorer – (Inlinks, except from domain) – 1,297
Google Webmaster Tools – 197
Majestic SEO – 2,702
Linkscape – 516
Alta Vista – 319

Which is the best site to use to check links? To get a list of them all then Yahoo / Majestic SEO will give you a comprehensive report. If you need to check new links coming it’s very hard to do as you need to compare one month to another.

To get an indication of what is happening with your links you want to track the trend buy keeping a total every 2 / 3 weeks. Track numbers of all of the different tools above as you then get a good indication of the general movement.

Sometimes as an SEO you reach a point when you’ve tried everything to get a site ranking or out of a penalty. If your out of options then a good place to turn is the Webmaster Forums from Google, MSN and Yahoo.

They are great resource to get help from people who really do want to help you even though they have nothing to gain. It seems at the moment that the Bing Webmaster Forums are being used to grab a free link to a site of your choice.

You can add a link into your post or signature and it won’t have a nofollow. For example

http://www.bing.com/community/forums/p/647352/9532720.aspx

Most of the people who are there to help may have a link to their blog or company which is acceptable considering they are helping people. Some are taking a little further.

As expected you always get a viagra link.

http://www.bing.com/community/forums/p/649775/9549831.aspx

And this fella has got an advert in his sig!

http://www.bing.com/community/forums/t/649566.aspx

But, if you give a platform for people to add links in that are not no followed, you will get links to porn sites, it’s inevitable.

http://www.bing.com/community/forums/p/649539/9546835.aspx

I’m guessing the links were not in the post originally and added at a latter date. The wysiwyg editor is secure you can’t stick iframes or JavaScript in but it just means that people will start posting to get a link and not necessarily to help someone.

Hope this hasn’t ousted anyones primary source of links!

We know that Google have recently be playing around with the Search Engine Results page removing the My account link top right and moving the setting links.

This morning a colleague of mine noticed that the font size had changed on Google and the box looked a bit bigger. This was shown on Google

Compared too

Looks like Channel 4 has a little duplication problem at the moment on their IP address http://83.98.28.10/. It’s resulting in double listing with the domain and the IP ranking for some queries which we know Google doesn’t like.

In total around 8,000 pages of 6,390,000 pages of Channel 4’s site have this problem which I’m sure isn’t having a massive negative effect in the grand scheme of things.

All that’s needed is a 301 re-direct from the IP address to the domain. On apache servers this can be done with something along the lines of

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} =999.999.999.999
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

I noticed at the start of the month that Google had moved about some of the links on the results pages, it hadn’t gone unnoticed as Pete Young at holisticsearch also spotted the changes.

It seems that the My Account button had now come back under the Setting link as “Google Account Setting”

Google were playing around all this weekend, at one point all the search options had gone.

Although a little change it shows that people do pick it up as it’s a button that’s used often. It reminds me of the time all my door knobs at my house were changes to open the other way, took some time to get used to!